by David Storey
Leonard’s fits never re-occurred. He developed a calm and rather passive nature. The consoling expression of the eyes remained, a kind of simplicity, as did the slightness of physique, but they never again appeared to be in opposition to one another. It was as if he had accepted the intrusion of life and given it reluctant accommodation.
3
The decision that Leonard should go to a council school had been his father’s. The original decision taken four years earlier, that he should have a private education, had been his uncle’s.
Austen appeared to Leonard as a man both of importance and distinction. From him he learned the circumstances of his situation, for even at that age he was made aware that his family as well as he himself were somehow different from other people. During the four years that he attended the private school Austen dominated his life. Afterwards he realised that the location of the school in the street next to where his uncle managed his furniture shop had been as important a factor in the choice of his education as the more ostensible one so frequently put forward: namely, that Leonard’s was an exceptional temperament and should be treated in an appropriate way. He perceived that Austen had a great influence upon his father.
Those four years were the happiest he could recollect. His clearest memories of this school were of those moments when he came out of the stuccoed Georgian entrance and saw his uncle waiting there, leaning on his cane, his face and smile as reassuring as the light itself which, in retrospect, always had a peculiar radiance and warmth. It was in this role of a man of fashion that Leonard knew his uncle best, rather than in his later guise of a dandy, when his tolerance and sympathy had given way to a strained, epigrammatic indulgence.
Austen’s shop was in one of the central thoroughfares of the town. Later, Leonard discovered how genuinely perceptive were his uncle’s tastes: at the time it was simply furniture that he never saw used – except in his Aunt Isabel’s house. He learned to look upon the individual pieces with that sense of affinity which he felt afterwards other children of his age discovered through their friends. His relationships with children were practically non-existent; it was for the simple, sculptured shapes in his uncle’s shop that he felt the closest sympathy: with those and with his uncle himself.
In a corner of the shop, which ran back deeply from its narrow street frontage, were several mounds of carpets. Frequently, when he saw his uncle engaged with his assistants or a customer, he would crawl across these soft piles, exploring their alarming colours and swirling shapes with his body; or, waiting impatiently until his uncle peeled back the next layer, he would run his hand through the short, tufted texture, peering intently at the incoherent designs as if in them he discovered a significance which had eluded him in the chaos outside. These expanses of colour, the chairs and tables of such rigid and precise construction, possessed a reality, even a friendliness which later he thought he might have found in people. But outside, the street, the passing crowds, the bruised and sooted surface of the buildings were of a hardness which not only confused him but which he knew quite simply to be wrong. The rhythmical colours and the devised structures, all unused, were the good things: outside everything was grey, and used, and even painful.
Although he soon realised that his Uncle Austen and his Aunt Isabel weren’t husband and wife but brother and sister, the one unmarried and the other disastrously married and separated from her husband, he still tended to see them as one person. That is, as one unit. He scarcely saw people as people, but more simply and certainly as states of feeling and association, so that his sense of a piece of distinctively designed furniture and his sense of a particular person weren’t to that extent separable. The thing which for him animated human beings also animated colours and shapes.
His aunt was a beautiful woman in much the same way as his uncle was distinguished looking, and her house, a tall, rambling Georgian one in a large square, held the same significance and reassurance for him as the shop: it was furnished with similar objects. Here, stimulated by his aunt’s ferocious bursts of emotion, and by her numerous adult visitors and friends, he found an added confirmation of his eccentric perception of things. He was ‘that extraordinary and unique little boy’, and his adult admirers provided a court to his absorbed contemplation of the world. He was treated as a ‘prince’. It was for this reason that he loved to see his aunt and his uncle at the Place, to see them in the building itself, for they brought out not only a sense of assurance in him but an admission of humour in his father, an emotion which, apart from these occasions, he scarcely saw. The cold and desperate building was somehow restored by their arguments and laughter.
Only with his mother did his feeling of unease merge into hostility. Partly in this he reflected Austen’s own unspoken antipathy. Within his protected world Leonard acquired a precocious instinct for atmosphere and feeling, more than for the objects which later, in isolation, came to represent them. When at last he could distinguish between feelings and objects, that is, when he no longer invested his own life with whatever things appealed to him, he recognised the dislike he had of his mother. Superficially, he was physically docile and acquiescent; mentally he was quick and alert. He could never commit any of his feelings to action. With his mother, however, these characteristics were reversed. In her presence he became physically active, almost militantly decisive, yet slow in understanding. Strangely, his mother seemed to welcome this reversal as though within it she recognised the unmistakable evidence of his affection for her. She treated him kindly, yet strictly; the only real moments of wildness came on very rare, frustrated occasions, from his milder and more tolerant father.
His mother was broad-set, with light brown, fluffy hair and a round phlegmatic face. Physically she gave the impression of being much stronger than his father, and Leonard sensed from the beginning that this dominance in some solemn and perhaps benevolent way extended into their emotional relationship as well. His father was deeply yet never overtly dependent upon his mother. It was, however, her appearance that divided Leonard’s life. Her oval, coarsely serious face, her greyish, bland eyes, separated her so distinctly from the dark, intenser look that united his father, Austen and Isabel and himself in such a remarkable similarity of expression, that he looked on her as an intruder into their private family world. In some important and inexplicable way, when he first saw Tolson he immediately confused him with his mother. It might have explained why, later, whenever he had been distressed by Tolson it was to his mother that he suddenly ran, clasping his arms round her thighs in a blind sense of submission which afterwards he always intensely regretted.
Yet on one occasion, much later, with Austen when he had been particularly articulate about this division of his world, his uncle had answered facetiously, ‘Yes, your father married a peasant and he can never bring himself to believe we’ve forgiven him.’ Although he didn’t then understand the simple allusion, it seemed to touch in him much deeper implications, and so decisively that the innocent course of his relationship with Austen was immediately changed. For no reason at all he began to sense a restlessness in Austen which transformed his entire view of his character.
These, however, were intuitions about an incoherent yet relatively peaceful world. It was his father, as if in despair both of such an enclosed environment, as well as of Leonard’s delicate physical health, who suddenly flung open the door and let in the robust thunder of the council school and of Tolson himself.
Almost at the same time Leonard’s sister Elizabeth was born, her Radcliffe features unmistakably stamped in the delicacy of her face.
For Leonard, however, there were certain strange impressions that continued to grow and even to become persistent. At times, in his dreams, he would see the dark landscape around the Place stripped of its buildings and streets; and across it, like projections of the rock itself, strode giants – black and massive creatures who, as they approached the Place, would rear up and by some monstrous articulation of their limbs leap high into the air. Here
, against the bulwark of clouds, they would fling themselves in contortions that shuddered the land, a reverberation that echoed in the sky itself; claps of thunder and prickled sheets of lightning that for a moment would thrust across the sweeping hills and valley, across the rock buttresses, crowns and pillars; a glare that made the stone itself glow, an illumination beaming from the earth itself.
And occasionally, as though he too were poised on some upper pinnacle of the Place, he would see dimly across the valley, standing on the jagged summit of the ridge opposite, the tallest and most massive giant of all, a tower rearing to the sky with a head set like a sun against the cloud, radiant and luminous and almost young. Dark wedges of hair sprouted like forests around its planetary skull.
Once he saw this figure stooping a moment as though to take a burden, then springing up, hands and arms outstretched like immense peninsulas of the earth to tear its passage through the clouds and disappear amongst cascading figures and stars. More usually, however, it stood aloof and still, gazing sometimes into the sky and at other times, it seemed, directly at him. Sometimes he would try and hide, crouch down, or hurry through the corridors of the Place itself, only to gaze up and see above him the poised face peering ferociously down.
At times it seemed that he recognised a look of despair on this giant face when it would stand like a frozen tower on the valley’s edge, peering out through the misty apertures about its head, and so still that if it moved it seemed as though the earth itself would crack. At other times he would see its arms stretched out towards him, thick arcs of flesh and bone flung like bridges across the valley, the fingers each like trunks never quite reaching him. He would back away and stand trembling, his body burning at the notion of its touch.
Often on moonlit nights he flew over the dark land, saw below like a luminous thread the river coiled between its pennine ridges; and heard, as each city of white towers passed below, its name whispered in the air, and the names too of giants and kings he had never known before. The names, repeated and confirmed, grew into the private mythology of his dreams, neither confided to nor shared with anyone.
Yet these had only been dreams. It was, in fact, through Tolson that he discovered a day-time context for his existence, and for the Place; that is, it was through Tolson’s sudden and violent intrusion that he learned to identify feelings with people, although he still tended to invest with feelings certain inanimate objects which instinctively he sensed should possess them: certain trees and stones, the Place itself, certain remarkable undulations of the land. If much later he took a delight, and even found a particular refuge, in abstracting his relationship with Tolson, at the time itself, as Tolson became a frequent visitor to the Place, their friendship was expressed in a vigorous physical delight and in Tolson’s sudden outbursts of curiosity about the building and his family. He even began to forget at times about his dreams.
Occasionally, like a dark shadow on this brightening cloud of interest and achievement – since Tolson was the first direct human contact Leonard had made in his life – he would notice on Tolson’s face as they emerged from some game, or inspection of the large and dusty rooms, a blunt, cautious reflectiveness, the look of someone scouting an enemy camp before an attack. It had the same disturbing effect as those other, equally infrequent moments when, explaining some historical aspect of the Place, Leonard would catch a glimpse of a vaguely familiar reproach: that same reproach which drew up Tolson’s figure in an instinctive gesture of aggression and pride. Leonard always felt that in some way the Place existed to the detriment of Tolson.
Nevertheless their relationship became the vehicle of his first excursion into that new and intimidating world outside. And as if to secure his position there, his curiosity about the building and the family was aroused to a pitch which only once, much later, was ever repeated. It was Austen rather than his father, Isabel rather than his mother, who provided the answers to his innumerable questions. His parents appeared to know little, and attach even less importance to the history of the Place. He passed on his information directly to Tolson as if to inflame him with the wonder implicit in this ancient house and, more indirectly yet importantly, in their friendship.
It was a promontory into his expanding world. He began to visit Tolson’s home, crowded with the muscular intentness of his numerous brothers and sisters, a pleasure as significant now as his previous visits to Austen’s shop and Isabel’s house. Leonard’s sombre and reflective face, his shy, startled humour, amused those impetuous half-adults of Tolson’s family, and they produced in him a spontaneity and directness which he had never experienced before.
Tolson had no father; he had been killed within the first few months of the Second World War – at about the time, Leonard afterwards decided, when he had first seen Tolson fight. Now Tolson presided over these visits to his house with a moody seriousness. He never joined in his brothers’ rough play with Leonard but stood watching it with a slow, jealous regard as though it were something he controlled with a precise power. Leonard recognised a certain strangeness in this as in the fact that, although invited, Tolson never brought his brothers and sisters to the Place. Yet it was something which he dismissed as easily as his mother’s resentment of Tolson. At this time she was giving all her attention to her daughter, Elizabeth, and it was his father who encouraged his friendship with Tolson as if it were the one thing he looked for in his son’s life. He had said to Leonard after meeting Tolson for the second time, ‘Victor’s very unsure of himself. Do you know what I mean? Let him know he can trust you.’ It had appealed intensely to a sense of loyalty deep in Leonard’s nature. His friendship was like a service he willingly and even passionately performed.
This apparent closeness and amicability lasted for two years. During that time Leonard was frequently reminded not only of Tolson’s remarkable physical strength – often he lay helpless beneath that giant body in some apparently friendly yet vaguely purposeful game – but also of a kind of frustration, a scarcely suppressed antagonism which resulted in sudden and irrational bursts of violence. These bouts grew to be a familiar part of Tolson’s behaviour, so that Leonard would watch with a shy smile whenever his friend relentlessly and mercilessly pursued a moth or butterfly, swatting it cleanly out of the air and beating it vigorously until it was an indistinguishable part of the leaves and debris on the ground. On other occasions he would suddenly throw stones up at the Place, narrowly missing the windows with an uncanny and malicious skill. Leonard never completely rid himself of this sense of a huge and pernicious energy hanging above his head: it came from the feeling in him that he was unworthily privileged to know such a complete person as Tolson. He increased his efforts to consolidate their friendship.
It became Austen’s habit, now that Leonard’s visits to the shop were comparatively rare, to visit the Place each week, and, whenever he could, to use the opportunity to show Leonard and Tolson some feature of the building that he imagined might interest them. More, however, he seemed interested in the relationship between the two boys themselves, to the extent that after a while Leonard began to recognise these apparent lectures as intrusions on his own informative role: rather than supplementing they began to detract from his means of maintaining Tolson’s interest. Whereas Tolson was frequently amused by Austen, by his appearance and manner rather than the content of what he said, Leonard began to look upon his uncle with increasing irritation. Austen revealed something absurd in his situation which Tolson only too quickly appreciated.
One hot day in summer Austen called the boys in through the open front doors of the Place and led them into the ‘Braganza Room’. This was the largest room on the ground floor, to the left of the main hall, and took its name from a florid and spectacular ceiling. Its central motif was an Indian corn plant, its cob partially shelled to reveal the grain, and symbolising, according to Austen, the acquisition of India by Charles II as the dowry of Catherine of Braganza. It was Austen’s favourite room and, as Leonard already knew, he spent a g
reat deal of his time there alone either admiring its features or, more frequently, gazing abstractly out of its windows. At the end opposite the door was the ‘Jezebel Mantelpiece’, a large slab of Caen stone carved in a Flemish style of the sixteenth century and set in an elaborate mantel of columns and decorative friezes.
Tolson was bored; he stood fidgeting, glancing up at the swirling relief of the ceiling, then out at the bright sunshine at the front of the house. At the same time as Leonard was aware of this, his irritated attention was drawn to Austen’s description of the stone as if in some way it represented the exact nature of his uncle’s personality. The meticulous shapes and incisions, the smoothed protrusions of the stone seemed to fit his ‘sense’ of Austen to a remarkable degree.
At the foot of the narrow tower, the summit of which was surmounted by a decorative pinnacle, lay Jezebel herself. Around her prostrate body were gathered several dogs and snakes, their legs and bodies delicately interlaced, and a toad and a lion, apparently intending to devour her. It was only as Austen described these extraordinary animals that Tolson actually looked at the carving. Jehu, in a Roman helmet, sat astride a magnificent horse surrounded by a group of heavily moustached soldiers, thick matchlocks on their shoulders: they all stared down impassively at the broken figure of the woman. It was at her that Tolson finally looked too, blushing. Then quite suddenly he laughed. She was naked.